Slavery has been abolished, there have been significant leaps and advances in civil rights, we’ve had a black president, but as much as we continue to work towards equality some stereotypes that were born centuries ago continue to overstay their welcome. In Ibram X. Kendi’s book, Stamped from the Beginning, he digs into the origins of many of these stereotypes and the reasons why they were reinforced into society over and over again. These ideas were born a long time ago on unfounded racist concepts, so they have no reason to continue to thrive in today’s music, politics, and daily conversation. Kendi brings a surplus of these historical stereotypes to our attention, but I’ll focus on three of them and connect them to today; black people have larger genitalia and are hypersexualized, they are stronger, and they are criminals. “Big black d***” and “fat black a**”, you hear these phrases or words like them in pop, hip-hop, and rap. They’ve become so common place that people will even bring it up in conversation among their peers, “I’ve heard…show more content… It might not seem as dangerous of a label, but it’s initial intention was again to dehumanize a whole race of people. “Superior physicality related Africans to those creatures containing the utmost physical prowess–animals.” (Kendi 56) Africans are not human, Africans are animals. That is the message that slaveholders wanted to get across. When we chuckle to our friends “Do you think he’s good at basketball?”, “how high do you think he can jump?” we do not realize that these questions were born from historical racism and we do not let that racism die when we keep encouraging that dialogue. The assumed strength of blacks is an unfair expectation that not only is a stereotype, but is one polluted with racist
